MMO scientists reckon the end of the world will be mostly unremarkable, apart from the 'relatively few' who go on a killing spree

pcgamer.com:

I'm not sure how much point there is studying the end of the world given that, should the end of the world come about, all bets will be off. But such thoughts of futility do not deter academics, and their latest wheeze is to have a look at what happens in an MMO game that is going to shut off: A virtual end of the world affair.

The game in question is the Korean MMO ArcheAge and players were studied during a beta test that was scheduled to last 11 weeks. Thus the study had a decent time range and could look at a whole host of (anonymised) player data over this period. Players knew that the beta would end at the point it did, and so the academics reckoned that, with a whole range of caveats, it might give us some idea of what will happen when the asteroid is about to hit, or Musk accidentally turns on Skynet.

The paper (spotted by IFLScience) has the not-very-heartening title «I Would Not Plant Apple Trees If the World Will Be Wiped: Analyzing Hundreds of Millions of Behavioral Records of Players During an MMORPG Beta Test». An important note is that it has been published but not peer-reviewed, so think twice before planning your doomsday strategy around the findings.

The abstract reads, in part:

In this work, we use player behavior during the closed beta test of the MMORPG ArcheAge as a proxy for an extreme situation [...] We analyzed 270 million records of player behavior [and] Our findings show that there are no apparent pandemic behavior changes, but some outliers were more likely to exhibit anti-social behavior (e.g., player killing).

So the top-level finding is: Most of us are fine, but a handful are going to go full berserker mode. The paper's title also plays on the adage «Even if I knew the world would go to